Principal Gifts & Campaign Leadership Gifts
Seven-figure conversations: institutional readiness, gift structuring, and the long partnership behind transformational gifts.
Through the Faith-Based lens
Institutional readiness looks different in a parish or diocese: the equivalent of a strategic plan and clean audits is a pastoral plan and diocesan financial oversight, and a principal gift here often surfaces during a campaign for a building or debt long carried. The decision unit this module asks fundraisers to map, spouses, children, advisers, often includes a family's confessor or spiritual director, someone whose counsel a donor may weigh as heavily as an attorney's. The strategy memo's discipline, writing the relationship down honestly rather than by hope, matters especially where a pastor's tenure may be shorter than the years the gift takes to mature.
Continuing education
1.25 points
Relationship Building · Securing the Gift
Learning objectives
- Define an institution's principal gift threshold and describe what changes above it: the donor's question, the decision unit, the time horizon, and the CEO's role.
- Recognize the forms a large gift may take, from appreciated securities and DAF grants to real estate and life-income arrangements, and apply the referral reflex for each.
- Draft a two-page principal gift strategy memo with a relationship map, a meaning thesis, a readiness checklist, a sequence, and team assignments.
- Run a quarterly principal review that rolls readiness gaps into an institutional to-do list and names which relationships advanced or stalled.
- Explain how a nine-figure lead gift's anatomy, loyalty noticed first, co-design before invitation, counsel on structure, translates to a smaller organization.
Designed for CFRE continuing education. Not yet accepted; no CFRE points can be claimed.
Lessons
- 25 min
Video lesson
How transformational gifts happen
III Discern · Relationship Building
- 20 min
Field guide· PDF
Gift structuring options explained
V Receive · Securing the Gift
- 18 min
Template· DOCX
The principal gift strategy memo
II See · Relationship Building
- 17 min
Case study· PDF
Case study: a nine-figure campaign's lead gift
IV Invite · Securing the Gift
This is members-only material.
Members get every lesson, template, and worksheet in all eight tracks, plus the support to put them to work in your shop.
More in this stage
Boards, Teams & Leadership
Running the Development Shop
Directing the work is a different craft than doing it. Plans, budgets, staff structure, and the operating rhythm of a healthy shop.
Capital Campaigns
Capital Campaign Readiness
Before the feasibility study, before the consultant: an honest readiness assessment and the two years of quiet work that make campaigns succeed.
Boards, Teams & Leadership
Hiring, Coaching, and Keeping Fundraisers
The average fundraiser tenure is 16 months. Build a team that stays: hiring for the real job, coaching the craft, and career paths that retain.